Hot House, Horses, Dogs

Today was supposed to be the hottest day in British history. The forecast was for 96-97 degrees Fahrenheit. It hasn't quite reached that recording breaking temperature where we are, but they're saying it's the hottest day in London since 1911 (but no, global warming isn't happening... yeah, right). It's about 95 here. Hot enough! The air feels heavy. Anyway...


We're a week into our house/horse/dog-sitting holiday. Moved into our apartment on the 8th and then 3 days later we drove back up to Winchester (actually Hursley, just outside Winchester) to start house-sitting for my former boss. They live in a thatch-roof cottage with a sizable back yard and several acres of pasture for their two horses. They also have two dogs, Jack Russel terriers, a male and a female. The female is the male's mom. They're very cute.

Though the four animals have a set routine that they go by, it's not too bad taking care of them. The horses have breakfast at 8:30am before they are let out to pasture for the day. At 6:30 they are brought back to the stables and fed dinner. Then at 9:00pm they get some sweet-smelling hay and one Polo mint each (horses with minty-fresh breath!). The dogs are pretty straight forward. Just food twice a day and being let out to do their business. Though they can pretty much do that when they please because we have the back door open when we're here. K has taken time off from work for the whole house-sitting period. I had a day off last Wednesday and have taken off today through Friday, too.

So far, the experience has gone fairly smoothly. We've been cooking food on the barbecue and eating outside. The animals were initially a bit stand-offish with us, understandably. The dogs were fairly easy to win over. The horses were a bit tougher. K had a breakthrough with them yesterday. It seems at least one of them has accepted her. Despite all the carrots I've been giving them, they're still a bit wary of me. Fair enough. I don't take it personally. However, the dogs have been able to sense that I'm a big softie because they only stare at me when we're eating even though I have never fed them from the table.

There's a big trampoline in the back yard by the stables. We've jumped on it a few times. The horses seem perplexed by this concept. Haven't tried getting them up there yet. Maybe we'll try that tomorrow. It's nice to lay on it at night to look up at the stars. Strangely comfortable. We'd sleep out there if we had a mosquito net or something because it's a bit hot upstairs in the house.

We had one abnormal thing happen the other night. Sunday evening. I was just about to serve a dinner of poached trout and pan-fried potatoes when we heard the dogs out front barking by the driveway gate. Went out to check on them and discovered a bloke and his girlfriend pulled over on the driveway with a broken-down red MG. He asked me if we had any oil because he had run out. I explained that we're just house-sitting, but I would have a look. In my head, I'm thinking, "Ran out of oil? That's not something you can really solve by putting oil back in the engine." Couldn't find any oil and I didn't feel like driving them anywhere because we were just about to eat and watch "Lost", so I told him we didn't have a car ("that BMW is not ours"), a little white lie that I instantly felt quite guilty about. He thumbed a ride quite quickly and got a lift to a petrol station a few miles away. I went back inside and we ate dinner. Then I decided to pop out to check on them afterwards. They were still out there. The engine turned over but it just wasn't starting. Gee, what a surprise, even after putting oil in it? We lent them a mobile to call the AA (the UK's AAA). He didn't have a membership, so he had to join over the phone before they sent out a truck. It took about 15 minutes for him to get through to someone, so I was talking to his girlfriend and what's this I hear? A familiar accent. And well, she does have quite a Nordic look. "Are you from Sweden?" Yes. I told her I was half Swedish and then we spoke Swedish for a little while. Quite random. They break down on the driveway of the house we are sitting and out comes a guy with an American accent who subsequently turns out to be able to speak Swedish. They boyfriend was surprised at first but then said, "You Swedes are everywhere!" A few minutes later, two horse-drawn gypsy wagons trundled by on the road next to us -- gypsy wagons like you'd see in a movie. One guy said he would trade the wagon for the MG. After a moment of "Ok, now I've seen it all", they told me the AA truck would arrive in "up to 2 hours". I invited to wait with us, but they decided to walk into town to go to the pub. A bit dumb on their part and sure enough, 45 minutes later there was a truck out there and they were nowhere in sight. I explained to the AA guy what was wrong with the car and where they had gone. He decided to wait around for 10 minutes before driving slowly into town to see if he could see them. As far as I could tell, he never came back with them. When we were closing up for the night, around 10 o'clock, I peeked out there to see if they were still there. Yep, waiting in the dark in the same place. They made their bed, now they can lie in it. It was stupid of them to leave, especially when I offered to let them wait here, so we left them to sort it out on their own. Which they seemed to have done because the car was gone the next morning.

Well, we have two more days out here in Hursley. They're coming back late Friday night, so we'll put the animals to bed and drive back home after the horses have gotten their hay and Polo mints. We might kidnap at least one of the dogs, though.

---

In other news...

We drove to Winchester today to do a bit of shopping (big sale at HMV right now) and to take a peek at our old apartment. No one has moved in yet! However, the realtor's sign out front says it has been let. Not sure when the new tenants are going to move in. It was supposed to be by yesterday. Perhaps we won't get a refund after all. Will have to call them to see what's going on.